"This leaves <snap> tracking edge."

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄]

I had a snap (atom) installed, and have been sent a new improved one which I want to test before I upload to the store. So I use this command to install it:-

snap install atom_1.23.1_amd64.snap --dangerous --classic

Which results in the following:-

atom 1.23.1 installed
This leaves atom tracking edge.

Why am I tracking edge if I just manually "side loaded" an application from my filesystem?

alan@hal:~$ snap info atom
name: atom
summary: A hackable text editor for the 21st Century.
publisher:
description: |
  Atom is a free and open source text editor that is modern,
  approachable, and hackable to the core.
commands:
  - atom.apm
  - atom
tracking: edge
installed: 1.23.1 (x1) 184MB classic
refreshed: 2017-12-19 15:21:51 +0000 UTC
channels:
  stable: 1.23.1 (106) 180MB classic
  candidate: 1.22.1 (76) 180MB classic
  beta: 1.22.1 (76) 180MB classic
  edge: 1.23.1 (106) 180MB classic

Surely I should stop tracking edge now I've installed locally?
(also the wording "This leaves <snap> tracking edge" seems a bit wonky and could be interpreted either way. "This leaves edge" or "This places in edge").

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I subscribe @chipaca - looking at the code, I think what the message is saying is: "The 'atom' snap that used to track the 'edge' channel is no longer doing that". However it looks a bit misleading so I think we need to improve it.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I created https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4420 for this.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

Sorry I missed this back then.

The snap is tracking a channel that is different from the channel it's installed from. This can happen when you install from edge but edge is closed so it gets it from beta for example. It can also happen if you had a snap tracking edge, and then sideload something over it.

The message is shown when the channel the snap is from does not match the one it's tracking.

Sideloading a snap does not change the tracking channel; you can 'snap switch --stable' a sideloaded snap, which will set the tracking channel to stable. Whether that makes sense or not is a separate conversation :-)

What would a better wording be?

"this revision is from channel %s; we'll continue to check channel %s for updates"?

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

(BTW the code has since been changed to not show the message when sideloading unless you also specify a channel then)

[Zygmunt Krynicki (zyga)]

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4420 has been merged in 2018 so marking as fix released.